On August 24, 2021, Dr. Scott Gottlieb sent an urgent email about my reporting to a contact at Twitter.
Gottlieb is the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, a close colleague of many federal officials - and a senior board member of Pfizer, which has made $70 billion selling mRNA vaccines.
In his email, Gottlieb forwarded an article I had written about Dr. Anthony Fauci on this Substack and complained, “This is whats promoted on Twitter. This is why Tony needs a security detail.”
Thus Gottlieb — whom Pfizer pays almost $400,000 a year to serve on its board, including its highest-level “executive committee” — began the final act in a secret months-long conspiracy to suppress my basic American right to free speech.
The conspirators included corporate, private, and federal actors.
They wanted to block my reporting about the failure of the mRNA Covid vaccines. They wanted to suppress debate about the necessity for vaccine boosters or mandates.
They wanted Twitter, the most important global platform for journalism, to ban me, even though Twitter had repeatedly found my posts did not violate its rules. They wanted to soil my reputation as a reporter and damage me and my family financially.
For a time, they succeeded.
It should go without saying that my Substack piece about “Tony” did not threaten or harass him in any way. It merely called him “arrogant” and a “skilled courtier” and mocked his infamous comment that criticizing him was “attacking science.”
No matter.
Four days after Gottlieb sent that email - and just 24 hours after he had a secret conference call with Twitter employees about me - Twitter permanently banned me, claiming I had violated its rules on Covid misinformation.
Even then, Gottlieb was not done trying to silence me. He pursued me after the ban, quickly informing Twitter when he learned that I had taken over another account to provide a new avenue for my reporting.
I offer here a three point plan to put the Democrats on a different path where they might reasonably hope to be once again the party of the common man and woman. I won’t pretend that will be easy but I think given political will it can be done. Perhaps the results of the 2022 election will help concentrate the mind as the prospect of the 2024 election looms (President Trump anyone?)
Here are the three parts of the plan, explicated in several of my recent posts and collected here in one convenient package.
1. Democrats Must Move to the Center on Cultural Issues
2. Democrats Must Promote an Abundance Agenda
3. Democrats Must Embrace Patriotism and Liberal Nationalism
Let’s take them each in turn.
Democrats Must Move to the Center on Cultural Issues
This is not optional. Many Democrats wish to believe the contrary and offer as proof the abortion issue where the party, thanks to the Supreme Court Dobbs decision, has been able to occupy center ground in opposition to significant parts of the GOP who wish to ban the procedure. But crime isn’t the abortion issue. Immigration isn’t the abortion issue. Race essentialism and gender ideology aren’t the abortion issue. Even the abortion issue isn’t the abortion issue once you get past opposing bans and start having to deal with the nitty-gritty of setting some limits on abortion access (as the public wants).
The sad fact is that the cultural left in and around the Democratic party has managed to associate the party with a series of views on crime, immigration, policing, free speech and of course race and gender that are quite far from those of the median voter. These unpopular views are further amplified by Democratic-leaning media and nonprofits, as well as within the Democratic party infrastructure itself, all of which are thoroughly dominated by the cultural left. In an era when a party’s national brand increasingly defines state and even local electoral contests, Democratic candidates have a very hard time shaking these cultural left associations.
As a direct result of these associations, the party’s—or, at least, Biden’s—attempt to rebrand Democrats as a unifying party speaking for Americans across divisions of race and class appears to have failed. Voters are not sure Democrats can look beyond identity politics to ensure public safety, secure borders, high quality, non-ideological education, and economic progress for all Americans.
Instead, Democrats continue to be weighed down by those whose tendency is to oppose firm action to control crime or the southern border as concessions to racism, interpret concerns about ideological school curricula and lowering educational standards as manifestations of white supremacy, and generally emphasize the identity politics angle of virtually every issue. With this baggage, rebranding the party as a whole is very difficult, since decisive action that might lead to such a rebranding is immediately undercut by a torrent of criticism. Democratic candidates in competitive races certainly try to rebrand on an individual level but their ability to escape the gravitational pull of the national party is limited.
This matters a great deal. The idea that Democrats can just turn up the volume on, say, abortion and select economic issues and ignore sociocultural issues where they are viewed as out of the mainstream is absurd. Culture matters and the issues to which they are connected matter. They are a hugely important part of how voters assess who is on their side and who is not; whose philosophy they can identify with and whose they can’t.
Thus, to even get in the door with many working class and rural voters and make their pitch, Democrats need to convince these voters that they are not looked down on, their concerns are taken seriously and their views on culturally-freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened. With today’s Democratic party, unfortunately, that is difficult. Resistance is stiff to any compromise that might involve moving to the center on such issues.
With this context in mind, consider some recent poll results. The latest NBC poll tested which party voters preferred on a number of different issues. Republicans were preferred over Democrats by 36 points on border security, 23 points on dealing with crime and by 19 points on immigration. All three of these ratings are the highest net advantages for the GOP ever found on the NBC poll.
In the recent New York Times/Sienna poll, voters by 15 points (49-34) say Democrats have gone too far in pushing a “woke” ideology on issues related to race and gender, rather than not far enough. This balloons to a 23 point margin (53-30) among all working class (noncollege) voters, 36 points (61-25) among white working class voters and 39 points (59-20) among rural voters.
In the same poll, voters, by 31 points (61-30) endorsed the idea that “gender is determined by a person’s biological sex at birth” rather than an identity that can be divorced from biological sex. Among all working class voters the gap was 43 points (67-24), among rural voters it was 51 points (70-19) and among white working class voters it was 54 points (73-19).
Even more lop-sided, the poll asked voters whether they supported or opposed “allowing public school teachers to provide classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity to children in elementary school (grades 1-5)” Note that this stipulation is actually stricter than the one in the Florida law that aroused such horror in Democratic circles. Voters responded by 43 points (70-27) that they opposed allowing such a practice. Among all working class voters, the margin was an astronomical 58 points (78-20), among rural voters it was 63 points (80-17) and among white working class voters it was an amazing 71 points (84-13).
It is…unclear whether Democratic politicians and voters are interested in making the compromises that would help them attract more voters. Many Democrats have instead embraced a purer version of liberalism in recent years, especially on social issues. This shift to the left has not prevented the party from winning the popular vote in presidential elections. But it has hurt Democrats outside of major metropolitan areas and, by extension, in the Electoral College and congressional elections.
Just so. Leonhardt also traces this dynamic among Hispanic voters in a column based on the Times survey. Leonhardt looked at a subgroup of Hispanics who seemed to be moving right. These were voters “who said they had voted for a mix of Democrats and Republicans in recent elections and said they were planning to vote Republican this year”. Leonhardt found:
More were registered as Democrats than Republicans, despite their voting intentions this year. They were even more heavily skewed to the working class (with about 80 percent not having a bachelor’s degree) and the young (with almost 60 percent under 45) than Hispanic voters as a whole. More than half were men, but the group also included many women.
By a wide margin, people in the subgroup said that the Democratic Party had moved too far left on social issues. By an even wider margin, they said that economic issues like jobs, taxes and the cost of living would influence their 2022 voting more than social issues like guns, abortion and democracy would.
At the root, the Hispanic voters drifting to the right appear to be pocketbook voters, focused more on their daily lives than divisive national debates.
There’s a signal there if Democrats care to receive it. Perhaps their embrace of “a purer version of liberalism…especially on social issues” has not been a particularly good idea. If they ever hope to overcome their structural obstacles to electoral and governance success, there really is no choice but to move to the center on cultural issues. It’s a prerequisite for everything else they want to accomplish.
A last-minute addition to the roster of speakers after the printing of the conference brochure was Mary Imparato of Belmont Abbey College. Ironically—or not—her talk came on the heels of Bovard and Hammer’s as part of the same panel. This was ironic because not only are Bovard and Hammer co-hosts of “NatCon Squad,” but because they both were featured speakers at the National Conservatism conference in Miami a few weeks before the Steubenville conference. Imparato—and here the irony—had recently made a splash in postliberal circles by penning a piece as a guest author for the “Postliberal Order” Substack. In her post, titled “What I Saw at Nat Con,” she claimed that the National Conservatism movement was at odds with integralist–that is, Catholic-postliberalism. In the piece, she insinuated that establishment conservatives (“neocons”) may have ingratiated themselves into the National Conservatism movement and further lamented the absence of any Catholic integralist cadre at the NatCon event. “the most coherent Catholic postliberal political thinkers weren’t even there, and their absence tells the whole story,” she wrote.
Subsequently, in a brief exchange of words on Twitter, one of the NatCon movement’s founders, Yoram Hazony, reminded Gladden Pappin that he had in fact spoken at a previous NatCon in Brussels. Hazony tweeted it seemed that there had been “a unilateral boycott of NatCon [Miami] by some of the leading ‘Catholic integralists.'” (According to the NatCon website, Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari were featured speakers at previous NatCons, as well.)
Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that in her speech, Imparato directed criticism yet again at the NatCons—the only explicit criticism I heard of the National Conservative movement at the conference. (The European Conservative published the National Conservatism Statement of Principles earlier this year.)
Imparato’s talk was moving in its depiction of her faith. She argued that she was an “integralist before I even knew what the word meant” when she gazed upon the statue of freedom atop the dome of the U.S. Capitol. and told a friend, “Wouldn’t it be beautiful if one day that were a statue of the Holy Mother instead?” No, the friend responded, because in America religion and state were necessarily separate.
Imparato argued that Catholics need not be apologetic about their religion, and (presumably) need not hide their desire to bring America—and the world, if possible—into the fold of their faith. Were these words in themselves controversial? Perhaps. Were these the kinds of thoughts many Catholics did—and do—think but dare not say in public? Absolutely. Can an overtly proselytizing faith win over American voters? On that point she did not elaborate.
“As the workings of the modern economy and the modern social order become increasingly inaccessible to everyday intelligence, art and philosophy abdicate the task of explaining them to the allegedly objective sciences of society, which themselves have retreated from the effort to master reality into the classification of trivia. Reality thus presents itself, to laymen and scientists alike, as an impenetrable network of social relations — as ‘role playing,’ the ‘presentation of self in everyday life.’”
